Author David Vann
Legend of a Suicide, synopsis
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In “Ichthyology,” a young boy watches his father spiral from divorce to suicide. The story is told obliquely, often through the
boy’s observations of his tropical fish, yet we also learn of his father’s last desperate attempts, including quitting dentistry for
commercial fishing. The story ends with an image of the “million tiny ripples of panic” which will emanate from this suicide.
The voice and style of the story borrow from Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, especially “At The Fishhouses” and “In The Waiting
Room,” and from Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping.
In “Rhoda,” we flash back to the beginning of the father’s second marriage and the boy’s fascination with his stepmother, who
has one partially closed eye. This eye becomes a metaphor for the adult world the boy can’t yet see into, including sexuality
and despair, which feel like the key initiating elements of the father’s eventual suicide. The style is minimalist, to fit the
violence and elusiveness of what the boy is trying to understand.
In “A Legend of Good Men,” we see the boy’s life with his mother after his father’s suicide, told through the series of men she
dates. The title and structure come from Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women. Each man and his life is examined, and what
holds these accounts together is the lasting damage to the mother’s life and the boy’s desire to recover or replace his father.
In “Sukkwan Island,” a novella, the father invites the boy homesteading for a year on a remote island in the southeastern
Alaskan wilderness. The father is suicidal, despairing over his separation from his second wife, and though he keeps hiding
this from his son and keeps making promises, he also steps off a small cliff, nearly kills himself and his son in a blizzard, takes
off for days after a bear, fires his handgun in the cabin, and weeps secretly at night. He’s finally caught by his son while
about to commit suicide. Embarrassed, he hands the gun to his son and walks out. His son, unexpectedly, puts the gun to
his own head and fires. Now the father has to witness his son’s suicide and has to carry the body around, traveling to
another island for help and becoming stranded. He wanders alone in the wilderness, eaten away by his culpability, until
finally he sets a cabin and part of a forest ablaze in order to be rescued. Upon rescue, he’s charged with murdering his son
and can’t prove he didn’t do it. He pays a lot of cash to the seedy crew of a small fishing boat to take him to Mexico, and they
throw him overboard.
“Sukkwan Island” is an exploration of my father and his psychology, an attempt to get close to him and to his despair. It’s also
a revenge story. After carrying the weight of his suicide all these years, I make him carry my dead body around. The scene
of his grief on seeing his son’s mutilated head is the only direct account in the collection of discovering a suicide. The story
was written while reading six novels by William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy and tries to find interior life in landscape.
In “Ketchikan,” the boy is 30 years old, returning to Ketchikan, Alaska, the place where his father first cheated on his mother,
the place where he might discover the origin of ruin. The story draws again from Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, returning to the
world of “Icthyology” (also set in Ketchikan) from an older perspective. The protagonist locates and invites Meredith, the
woman his father first cheated with, to dinner, along with her husband. She turns out to be different than he had imagined,
and he’s left with the sense of “a world held in place, as it turned out, by nothing at all.” His displacement is told obliquely, as
in “Icthyology,” through the contemplation of fish, landscape, and origins. This story sets the limits, finally, of the search for
understanding the father and his suicide.
“The Higher Blue” repeats the dramatic structure of “Icthyology” but in a fabulist riff which provides an epilogue to the book.
The story is set in Fairbanks, where the father actually killed himself. As the father makes zabiglione and prepares to blow
himself up, the boy hides away in the cabinet, refusing to participate anymore.
the River City Writing Awards in Fiction (judged by Susan Minot) and appeared in River City.appeared in Fourteen Hills.
“Ichthyology,” “Rhoda,” and “A Legend of Good Men” collectively received a appeared in Fourteen Hills. “Ichthyology,”
“Rhoda,” and “A Legend of Good Men” collectively received a Fourteen Hills. “Ichthyology,” “Rhoda,” and “A Legend of
Good Men” collectively received a Henfield/Transatlantic Review “Ichthyology,” “Rhoda,” and “A Legend of Good Men”
collectively received a Henfield/Transatlantic Review Award. An Henfield/Transatlantic Review Award. An earlier version of
this collection received second place in the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Prize for the novel.Society Prize for the novel.
boy’s observations of his tropical fish, yet we also learn of his father’s last desperate attempts, including quitting dentistry for
commercial fishing. The story ends with an image of the “million tiny ripples of panic” which will emanate from this suicide.
The voice and style of the story borrow from Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, especially “At The Fishhouses” and “In The Waiting
Room,” and from Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping.
In “Rhoda,” we flash back to the beginning of the father’s second marriage and the boy’s fascination with his stepmother, who
has one partially closed eye. This eye becomes a metaphor for the adult world the boy can’t yet see into, including sexuality
and despair, which feel like the key initiating elements of the father’s eventual suicide. The style is minimalist, to fit the
violence and elusiveness of what the boy is trying to understand.
In “A Legend of Good Men,” we see the boy’s life with his mother after his father’s suicide, told through the series of men she
dates. The title and structure come from Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women. Each man and his life is examined, and what
holds these accounts together is the lasting damage to the mother’s life and the boy’s desire to recover or replace his father.
In “Sukkwan Island,” a novella, the father invites the boy homesteading for a year on a remote island in the southeastern
Alaskan wilderness. The father is suicidal, despairing over his separation from his second wife, and though he keeps hiding
this from his son and keeps making promises, he also steps off a small cliff, nearly kills himself and his son in a blizzard, takes
off for days after a bear, fires his handgun in the cabin, and weeps secretly at night. He’s finally caught by his son while
about to commit suicide. Embarrassed, he hands the gun to his son and walks out. His son, unexpectedly, puts the gun to
his own head and fires. Now the father has to witness his son’s suicide and has to carry the body around, traveling to
another island for help and becoming stranded. He wanders alone in the wilderness, eaten away by his culpability, until
finally he sets a cabin and part of a forest ablaze in order to be rescued. Upon rescue, he’s charged with murdering his son
and can’t prove he didn’t do it. He pays a lot of cash to the seedy crew of a small fishing boat to take him to Mexico, and they
throw him overboard.
“Sukkwan Island” is an exploration of my father and his psychology, an attempt to get close to him and to his despair. It’s also
a revenge story. After carrying the weight of his suicide all these years, I make him carry my dead body around. The scene
of his grief on seeing his son’s mutilated head is the only direct account in the collection of discovering a suicide. The story
was written while reading six novels by William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy and tries to find interior life in landscape.
In “Ketchikan,” the boy is 30 years old, returning to Ketchikan, Alaska, the place where his father first cheated on his mother,
the place where he might discover the origin of ruin. The story draws again from Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, returning to the
world of “Icthyology” (also set in Ketchikan) from an older perspective. The protagonist locates and invites Meredith, the
woman his father first cheated with, to dinner, along with her husband. She turns out to be different than he had imagined,
and he’s left with the sense of “a world held in place, as it turned out, by nothing at all.” His displacement is told obliquely, as
in “Icthyology,” through the contemplation of fish, landscape, and origins. This story sets the limits, finally, of the search for
understanding the father and his suicide.
“The Higher Blue” repeats the dramatic structure of “Icthyology” but in a fabulist riff which provides an epilogue to the book.
The story is set in Fairbanks, where the father actually killed himself. As the father makes zabiglione and prepares to blow
himself up, the boy hides away in the cabinet, refusing to participate anymore.
the River City Writing Awards in Fiction (judged by Susan Minot) and appeared in River City.appeared in Fourteen Hills.
“Ichthyology,” “Rhoda,” and “A Legend of Good Men” collectively received a appeared in Fourteen Hills. “Ichthyology,”
“Rhoda,” and “A Legend of Good Men” collectively received a Fourteen Hills. “Ichthyology,” “Rhoda,” and “A Legend of
Good Men” collectively received a Henfield/Transatlantic Review “Ichthyology,” “Rhoda,” and “A Legend of Good Men”
collectively received a Henfield/Transatlantic Review Award. An Henfield/Transatlantic Review Award. An earlier version of
this collection received second place in the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Prize for the novel.Society Prize for the novel.
© Copyright 2005 David Vann